This text was published in the review Modern
Poetry in Translation Volume 13 (1998)

It is quite difficult to describe the problems facing translators
from languages such as Korean, which use a different system of writing
and which are totally unlike English in structure as well as cultural context.
From time to time articles are seen discussing the problems involved in
translating Japanese; since Korean is very similar to Japanese as a poly-
syllabic agglutinating language employing a huge number of Chinese loan-words,
the difficulties sound familiar to us.

Ever since Walter Benjamin pointed out that French pain
and German Brot are not the same (besides, neither corresponds to
sliced wholemeal from Marks), and probably well before that, it has been
obvious that translation is an approximative science, or perhaps an ambivalent
art. Translation is in some ways easier when working from a language like
Korean, which has no articles and no consistent distinction between singulars
and plurals, always puts the verb at the end, and does not necessarily
give every verb a defined subject. At least we know what we are changing.

In addition, Korean poetry is often rendered more "poetic" by
the use of suspended clauses and broken grammatical structures. In order
to give added semantic depth, recourse may be made to more or less recondite
Chinese characters or to archaic or dialect vocabulary from the native
language (which is not written in the Chinese ideogrammes but in a set
of phonetic symbols invented in the 15th century). Much of the effect in
certain highly acclaimed poets' works is due to their exploitation of vernacular
idiom and the rhythms of language rooted in a not yet fully extinct rural
oral culture. None of these elements can be adequately represented in translation.

One of our great problems, naturally, is how to translate the
vocabulary of a different culture: the pain/Brot problem. So many
aspects of everyday life, assumed by the writers to be familiar to the
readers, correspond to nothing outside of Korea. This is particularly a
problem in the many works that depend for their effect on the immense difference
between the traditional life-style of the village house in which most Koreans
alive today grew up and the urban apartment in which they are now living.
Evocations of the sunlight (or better, moonlight) falling on, or of the
wind shaking, the paper covering the sliding fretwork window or door of
the rooms cannot awaken fond memories in translation. Yet in the original
they are not "exotic" but homely. Koreans translating Seamus Heaney's work
find themselves confronting similar problems. Plants and tools are different,
and we have no peat-bogs...

The transition from the old rural culture to the modern urban
one underlies a lot of modern Korean literature. Equally if not more challenging
is the presence as hidden "subtext" of awareness and memories of the dramas
of modern Korean history. The three million dead of the Korean War (1950-3)
haunt the lines and there is no need to put '(1950-3)' when writing in
Korean. Recent history is often simply referred to by figures: 419 (massacre
of students by Syngman Rhee in April 1960), 518 (beginning of Kwangju uprising
during Chon Doo-Hwan's coup in May 1980), 625 (invasion of the South by
North Korea in June 1950), and although a reference to November 11
may still suggest something in England, how are we to translate such things
while avoiding a lengthy footnote? "May" is not "hawthorn" in Korea, it
is massacre and military coup, demonstrations and martyrdom.

Poetry is still a popular art in Korea, although poetry performances
are virtually unknown. Go into the big bookstores and you will find dozens
of schoolchildren avidly reading the latest poetry collections, some of
which sell in thousands or more. There are upward of two thousand published
poets alive in Korea today. Fiction too is pretty popular, with a recent
trend towards multi-volume literary soap-operas, the largest of them now
past its seventeenth volume.

Naturally enough, the things that please the reading public here
are not necessarily designed for a wider readership and although a lot
of modern world literature is translated (not often very convincingly),
it does not always find a wide degree of understanding.

Modern Korean literature, as opposed to the traditional forms
mostly imitating classical Chinese models, has barely a century of history.
Korea was under severe Japanese oppression for almost half of that time,
when the Korean language itself was often banned or under attack. As a
result, writing poetry in Korean became a means of nationalistic resistance
and the custom grew of seeing certain poems as icons of Korean identity.
These works were not usually overt declarations of independence but indirect,
evocations of themes and situations which might be read in various ways
but recognized as essentially Korean. These poems were then taught to children,
inscribed on stone, memorized by the whole population.

To translate such a poem is almost inevitably an act of transgression,
since the specific aura that brought it to its iconic status can never
be reproduced. Kim So-Wol (1902-1935) was one of modern Korea's finest
lyric poets, undoubtedly. Among his works is one that virtually every Korean
feels unthinkingly patriotic about. A Korean who tries to translate Korean
poetry into another language usually insists on tackling it first, in part
because it is quite simple. It is Korea's most often (mis)translated poem.
The poem's title is Chindallae-kkot (Azaleas) and if we transcribe
the Korean sounds into English alphabet the first stanza goes:

The speaker is conventionally thought to be a woman. In Korean
tradition, women are seen as the bearers of suffering and they certainly
have had to put up with an awful lot, usually at the hands of men, although
the most often evoked tormentor of younger women is their mother-in-law.
Usually Koreans read the poem as a pathetic but dignified "end-of-affair"
speech and explain (or even translate) the last line as meaning the opposite
to what it says. Although the grammatical forms indicate time- yet-to-come
(no future tense in Korean), the poem is read as the report of a present
parting.

Any attempt to read it in a more nuanced way is liablt to be rejected
with cries of outrage. Suggesting that there is a tension, that the disgust
and departure are imagined as lying in the future in speech addressed to
the man within a relationship strong enough for the very idea of parting
to evoke incredulous smiles and provoke feelings of even greater closeness,
is rejected as heresy and treason.

What follows below is a "suite" of adaptations of the poem in
the light of all this, moving progressively in the direction of iconoclasm.
Needless to say, none claims to be a strictly literal translation. We ought
perhaps to reflect more on the parodic nature of the translator's work
as a whole.

When seeing me sickens you
and you walk out
I'll send you off without a word, no fuss.

When you say goodbye
turn aside and walk away
I tell you now that on that day
I'll not shed a tear.

For most western readers, though, the tone surely needs to be made
sharper and less exotic:

One day you'll walk out on me, I know,
saying you need a change of air;
you hope I understand, you do so hate a fuss.

I suppose you'd love to see me dancing
somewhere out ahead of you,
scattering azaleas in your path, perhaps?

I can just see you there, prancing along
squashing those poor flowers underfoot
as you fade away into the sunset.

Oh yes, you'll walk out one day, I know,
saying you need a change of air;
you think I'll mind? I won't, you know.

An alternative exercise to this, one which is sometimes done in
Korea, is to collect a number of translations made over the years by more
or less reputed translators, Korean and foreign, put them side by side,
and smile knowingly as you list the 'errors'. I believe that this sport
ought to be called "translator-bashing". The immense difficulty (utter
impossibility) of finding adequate "equivalents" for Korean words and structures
leaves everything we do wide open to challenge.

The final question concerns readers' response. Because Koreans
care intensely about their literary heritage, and value famous works very
highly, they are convinced that if someone makes a "good" translation of
a work, every foreign reader will immediately respond to it as Koreans
do. It is very hard indeed to convince them that perhaps American or British
sensitivities may not be tuned to the same emotional (and nationalistic)
wavelengths.

In the end, the translator can only produce something that seems
a fairly valid representation in another language of at least the surface
sense of a Korean work and hope that readers in the outside world may hear
some faint echo of beautiful tunes from a distant, tragically divided land.